Amazon's 1-Click may be neat but - patently - it's absurd

Like many people in my line of business, I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon. It's by far the slickest, most efficient e-commerce operation on the Web. Unlike many of its competitors, it has cracked the 'fulfilment' problem - the tedious business of stuffing the goods into packets and getting them to my home in a stated period.

It is also one of the few e-commerce operations to understand that maintaining its website is a serious editorial job rather than a mere technical function.

Some time ago, the Amazon folks came up with an ingenious wheeze for harnessing 'cookies' - those tiny files that sites can deposit on your hard drive. Why not, they reasoned, use cookies to save customers the tedium of entering their personal details, credit card number and the like every time they make a purchase. So they crafted a system, christened 1-Click Ordering, which made this possible. If you've opted for this system, all you have to do after finding a book or a CD in the Amazon catalogue, is to click the button and the order is on its way.

Neat, eh? Too neat, as it happens, because 1-Click is very bad for one's financial health. It makes it too easy to buy stuff on impulse. Worse still, it makes it easy for your nearest and dearest to order books and records on your credit card - which is why many of us have learned to avoid 1-Click like the plague. In fact, it's so effective that one of Amazon.co.uk's own people told me she'd switched it off on her own machine because even her share options wouldn't cover the resulting bills.

Having conceived this excellent wheeze for parting intellectuals from their money, Amazon then did something naughty - it applied for a US patent on 1-Click. And, for some unfathomable reason, it got one, even though I cannot for the life of me see why. Where is the 'prior art' in 1-Click? It's merely a clever use of an established, open technology - the cookie protocol. Granting Amazon a patent on this wheeze is tantamount to granting a patent on a business process, like perhaps being able to patent going shopping on a Thursday afternoon in a yellow car.

Now the first law of intellectual property is that it has no value unless you defend it, and so when Barnes and Noble, the leading off-line bookseller in the US, decided to offer on their website a service similar to that provided by 1-Click, Amazon sued for infringement. B&N decided (rightly) to fight, and currently teams of m'learned friends on $600 an hour plus expenses are arguing among themselves.

As it turns out, Amazon was not the first company to exploit the idiocy of US patent law in this regard (though that's no excuse). It was simply following the path blazed by a guy named Jay Walker [sic], the founder of Priceline.com, who holds 18 patents on Internet business ideas and has about 250 more pending.

The implications of this crazy situation are alarming even to the brain-dead business community, which sees the Web as the new Klondyke. For if it's possible to patent a business process (rather than a genuine technology), commercial use of the Web will grind to a halt as lawyers slog it out over every new business idea.

And because the Web is global, the fact that it's US law that's defective is no consolation for Europeans. 'The time is fast approaching,' one leading UK lawyer said to me recently, 'when the first person every UK Internet start-up will have to hire is a US patent attorney.'

Meanwhile, another idiocy of filtering software has emerged. A reader reports that www.purenz.com the major New Zealand tourism site on the Web, is blocked by the software in use at his local public library.

Could this be anything to do with the fact that its outdoor activities section is labelled 'Thrill Zone'?